Pool lights illuminate the water at night for the safety of swimmers and for aesthetic purposes. The illumination emanates from underwater lights affixed to the wall of the pool. As used herein, a pool is used generically to refer to a container for holding water or other liquids. Examples of such containers are recreational swimming pools, spas, and aquariums.
To enhance the aesthetics, current underwater pool lights use a transparent color filter or shade affixed to the front of the lens of the pool light to filter the light emanating from the lens of the pool light and thus add color to the pool. The color filters come in a variety of colors but only one of these color filters can be affixed to the pool light at a given time. Thus, the color of the pool stays at that particular color that the color filter passes. In order to change the color of the pool, the color filter must be removed from the pool light and a different color filter installed across the lens of the pool light.
An alternate form of adding color to the pool is through the use of fiber optics. A remote source of color light, referred to as an illuminator, illuminates an end of the fiber-optic cable, and the fiber-optic cable conducts the color light to a fiber optic lens assembly that is installed in the pool light. The source of color light from the illuminator is a bulb and a rotating color wheel that has pie-slice segments that are different color filters. The color wheel, driven by a motor, rotates between the end of the fiber-optic cable and a light bulb. As the different color filters rotate past the bulb, the light passing through the color wheel changes color.
Although an improvement over the color-filter-across-the-lens method of providing color, the fiber-optic cable dissipates the light, and, consequently, multiple illuminators are necessary to provide an acceptable intensity of light at the pool. When more than one illuminator is used, the color wheels of the illuminators must be synchronized to provide the same accent color throughout the water.
To achieve synchronization, known fiber-optic pool lighting systems designate one illuminator as a master unit and the other light sources are referred to as slave units. The master unit generates a master reference signal to which the slave units synchronize their color wheels.
To transmit the master reference signal to each slave unit, a three-wire cable is connected from the master unit to the slave units. Because electrical conduit and wires must installed between the master unit and the slave units, costs are incurred.
A need therefore exists for a synchronization circuit for a pool lighting system, illuminator, and method therefore that can synchronize the color wheels of the illuminators without the additional cost of installing electrical conduit and wires between the master unit and the slave units.